Chapter 4 assesses early modern Scottish sovereignty discourse, which maintained strong continuities with the Middle Ages. The chapter begins by surveying typical claims to independence in parliamentary acts and in two political texts stemming from the Eight Years’ War, The Complaynt of Scotland and William Lamb’s Ane Resonyng of Ane Scottis and Inglis Merchand Betuix Rowand and Lionis. It then examines how some later writing revised the sovereign recognition, employing the contrasting examples of George Buchanan’s De Jure Regni apud Scotos Dialogus and James VI’s The Trew Law of Free Monarchies. Further modifications of the paradigm occur in Buchanan’s Rerum Scoticarum Historia, which refashions the kingdom’s early history to justify the deposition of Mary Queen of Scots. This inventive use of history continues in Andrew Melville’s fragmentary epic romance Gathelus, which creatively contrasts sovereignty as unbridled imperial expansion and as virtuous independence through a form of the recognition scene.

This chapter proposes the historical analysis of the formation, expression and impact of public opinion as an alternative to a Habermasian interpretation of the public sphere. This approach focuses on opinion politics to capture contemporary efforts to influence and make claims about extra-institutional opinions for political ends, paying particular attention to social participation and contemporary language. Attempting to avoid structural limitations and teleology, this assessment of Scottish public politics will show how religious and constitutional tensions created by the 1560 Protestant Reformation and 1603 union of the Scottish and English crowns motivated the crown and its opponents to harness the power of opinion at large, creating new ways to describe, assert, recognise and control collective opinion.